Five tips for the beginner gardener

Gardening guru and mastermind behind the carefully curated online store What You Sow, Lyndsey Haskell, shares her top four tips for beginner gardeners. These are the do’s and don’ts you need to heed as a beginner gardener when starting out in your new patch of dirt:

1. Start with courgettes

Courgettes are a great vegetable for a beginner grower – they’re so easy to grow and you get a huge amount of food from them. The courgette Black Beauty is the most popular of the seed varieties that we sell. However, when you get a glut you really know about it, so my advice is to develop a repertoire of courgette recipes and save them on Pinterest. Be sure to thin your courgette plants when they’re young unless you want to eat courgettes every day for every meal throughout Autumn.

2. Grow other produce that you’ll use

Grow things that you will use, and experiment with different crops as not everything will work in the location you live. Herbs are always a good idea – things like rosemary and sage are woody perennials that you don’t need to sow every year. If you have a greenhouse, try planting tomatoes and cucumbers or chilis, which you can dry if you don’t use them all at once. Potatoes that you’ve grown yourself taste divine so they’re worth a try if you’re just starting out (see if you can get hold of King Edward seed potatoes – they’re so tasty).

3. Get yourself some worms

Get a worm farm so you can turn your kitchen scraps into the most incredible compost and an extremely rich fertiliser. It will do wonders for your garden and saves so many food scraps and leftovers from going to landfill.

4. Plant the type of plants that you can pluck

Plant flowers such as sweet peas and cornflowers that you can pick and bring into your home.

5. Protect against slugs

Everyone has their own tips on how to avoid slug damage, but my advice is threefold: